Monthly Archives: February 2009

John Cacioppo and William Patrick

While the objective in going to certain bars and dance clubs appears to be getting drunk and hooking up, how many of the people crowding in are actually driven by a deeper craving for human connection that they simply don’t know how to pursue?

John Cacioppo and William Patrick, Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection, New York, 2009, p. 37

Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending

Farmers don’t benefit from competition between their domesticated animals or plants. In fact, reduced competition between individual members of domesticated species is the secret of some big gains in farm productivity, such as the dwarf strains of wheat and rice that made up the “Green Revolution.” Since the elites were in a very real sense raising peasants, just as peasants raised cows, there must have been a tendency for them to cull individuals who were more aggressive than average, which over time would have changed the frequencies of those alleles that induced such aggression. This would have been particularly likely in strong, long-lived states, because situation in which rebels often won might well have favored aggressive personalities. This meant some people were taming others, but with reasonable amounts of gene flow between classes, populations as a whole should have become tamer.

Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, New York, 2009, pp. 111-112

Stephen Ceci and Wendy Williams

Consider two recent high-profile cases. In 2005, Harvard’s then-president Lawrence Summers suggested gender differences in intrinsic ability as one cause of the dearth of women in the top tier of science, rather than espousing the popular view that women’s under-representation results from biased hiring, discriminatory tenure practices and negative stereotypes. Summers’s insinuation of biologically-based sex differences in cognitive ability was radioactive, setting off debates on campuses and outpourings of editorials. Despite apologizing for reckless language — which his supporters felt research supported — he later resigned.

James Watson is the most illustrious scholar to have his career ended for reckless language. Watson’s downfall was his assertion that “all our social policies are based on the fact that [African] intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really”. Although he hoped everybody was equal, “people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true”. Watson instantly plunged from A-list Nobelist to outcast, and was suspended from his chancellorship of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Watson later clarified in a statement that he does not believe Africans to be genetically inferior, but this had little impact on the controversy.

Watson’s first assertion could be read as scientifically supported: black Africans’ IQ scores are lower than those of white Europeans. But Watson’s use of ‘intelligence’ was interpreted as meaning ‘intrinsic cognitive ability’, ignoring how unfamiliarity with testing format, low quality of schooling, or poor health might depress IQ scores. There have been analyses showing average national IQs for sub-Saharan Africa to be approximately 30 points lower than average IQs for predominantly white European nations, and drawing a racial conclusion from those results. A refutation of these analyses would provide an opportunity to advance understanding. Sadly, although these analyses can be refuted, as we and others have done, most of those who scorned Watson never knew they existed.

Attacks on Watson and Summers extinguished discussion by making moral attributions about their presumed character flaws rather than debating facts. But character attacks lead to a one-party science that squelches divergent views.

Some scientists hold more ‘acceptable’ views, ourselves included. We think racial and gender differences in IQ are not innate but instead reflect environmental challenges. Although we endorse this view, plenty of scholars remain unpersuaded. Whereas our ‘politically correct’ work garners us praise, speaking invitations and book contracts, challengers are demeaned, ostracized and occasionally threatened with tenure revocation.

Stephen Ceci and Wendy M. Williams, ‘Should scientists study race and IQ? YES: The scientific truth must be pursued’, Nature, vol. 457, no. 7231 (February 12, 2009), pp. 788-789

Roy Walford

I do confess I find Sears entertaining. On pages 186 and 187 of The Anti-Aging Zone he lists a number of signs or, if you will, “biomarkers,” to inform you whether you are “in the Zone” or not, i.e., whether you are following the Zone diet properly. These include how you feel generally, whether you are groggy in the morning, are fatigued, have headaches, and ten other markers of similar sophistication. One of these biomarker signs is the following, and I quote Sears exactly, “When the stool is isodense with water (i.e., it floats), that becomes a very good indicator of optimal eicosanoid balance.” In other words, if your shit floats, you are “in the Zone.” To this I have but one question: Where are you when it hits the fan?”

Roy Walford, Beyond the 120-Year Diet: How to Double Your Vital Years, New York, 2000, pp. 20-21

Greg Egan

Freud had saddled Western culture with the bizarre notion that the least considered utterances were always, magically, the truest—that reflection added nothing, and the ego merely censored or lied. It was an idea born more of convenience than anything else: he’d identified the part of the mind easiest to circumvent—with tricks like free association—and then declared the product of all that remained to be ‘honest’.

Greg Egan, Distress, London, 1995, pp. 82-83

John McTaggart

I may be wrong in believing that matter exists independently of me. But the suggestion that I am wrong in believing I have a sensation is absurd. The belief is not sufficiently separable from the sensation for the possibility of error. I may, of course, be wrong in believing that I had a sensation in the past, for memory may deceive me. And I may be wrong in the general terms which I apply to a sensation, when I attempt to classify it, and to describe it to others. But my knowledge that I am having the sensation which I am having is one of those ultimate certainties which it is impossible either to prove or to deny.

John McTaggart, Human Immortality and Pre-existence, London, 1916, pp. 26-27

Alastair Norcross

Since, according to maximizing utilitarianism, any act that fails to maximize is wrong, there appears to be no place for actions that are morally admirable but not required, and agents will often be required to perform acts of great self-sacrifice. This gives rise to the common charge that maximizing utilitarianism is too demanding. […] How should a utilitarian respond to this line of criticism? One perfectly respectable response is simply to deny the claims at the heart of it. We might insist that morality really is very demanding, in precisely the way utilitarianism says it is. But doesn’t this fly in the face of common sense? Well, perhaps it does, but so what? Until relatively recently, moral “common sense” viewed women as having an inferior moral status to men, and some racs as having an inferior status to others. These judgments were not restricted to the philosophically unsophisticated. Such illustrious philosophers as Aristotle and Hume accepted positions of this nature. Many utilitarians (myself included) believe that the interests of sentient non-human animals should be given equal consideration in moral decisions with the interests of humans. This claims certainly conflicts with the “common sense” of many (probably most) humans, and many (perhaps most) philosophers. It should not, on that account alone, be rejected.

Alastair Norcross, ‘The Scalar Approach to Utilitarianism’, in Henry R. West (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Mill’s Utilitarianism, Malden, Massachusetts, 2006, p. 218

Truman Capote

‘Hold on,’ he said, gripping my wrist. ‘Sure I loved her. But it wasn’t that I wanted to touch her.’ And he added, without smiling: ‘Not that I don’t think about that side of things. Even at my age, and I’ll be sixty-seven January ten. It’s a peculiar fact0—but, the older I grow, that side of things seems to be on my mind more and more. I don’t remember thinking about it so much even when I was a youngster and it’s every other minute.

Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, New York, 1958, pp. 14-15

John Broome

Prichard seems to have thought […] that the normativity of morality cannot be explained at all. But that does not follow. Even if there is no instrumental explanation of its normativity, there may be an explanation of some other sort. It would truly be unsatisfactory if there was no explanation at all. It would be a bad blow to philosophy to find there are inexplicable facts.

John Broome, ‘Reply to Southwood, Kearns and Star, and Cullity’, Ethics, vol. 119, no. 1 (October, 2008), p. 98

Samuel Scheffler

I believe that utilitarianism refuses to fade from the scene in large part because, as the most familiar consequentialist theory, it is the major recognized normative theory incorporating the deeply plausible-sounding feature that one may always do what would lead to the best available outcome overall.

Samuel Scheffler, The Rejection of Consequentialism: A Philosophical Investigation of the Considerations Underlying Rival Moral Conceptions, rev. ed., Oxford, 1994, p. 4

Shelly Kagan

The objection that consequentialism demands too much is accepted uncritically by almost all of us; most moral philosophers introduce permission to perform nonoptimal acts without even a word in its defend. But the mere fact that our intuitions support some moral feature hardly constitutes in itself adequate philosophical justification. If we are to go beyond mere intuition mongering, we must search for deeper foundations. We must display the reasons for limiting the requirement to pursue the good.

Shelly Kagan, ‘Does Consequentialism Demand Too Much?’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 13, no. 3 (1984), p. 239

John Lucas

Although men may sometimes take a God’s eye view of the universe, they cannot consistently think of themselves as not being covered by any universal account they give of the world or of humanity. For they are men, and live in the world. It is a fair criticism of many philosophies, and not only determinism, that they are hoist with their own petard. The Marxist who says that all ideologies have no independent validity and merely reflect the class interests of those who hold them can be told that in that case his Marxist views merely express the economic interests of his class, and have no more claim to be adjudged true or valid than any other views. So too the Freudian, if he makes out that everybody else’s philosophy is merely the consequence of childhood experiences, is, by parity of reasoning, revealing merely his delayed response to what happened to him when he was a child. So too the determinist. If what he says is true, he says it merely as the result of his heredity and environment, and nothing else.

John Lucas, The Freedom of the Will, Oxford, 1970, p. 114